Public Decency, Common Good

Have we as a society become so inured to coarse language that we have no inhibitions, no embarrassment, about public use and display of certain words, certain expressions? That we have little or no regard for the sensitivities, even the quality, of common life? Even more, do we who identify as followers of Jesus have no such inhibitions or embarrassment, or have such little regard for common life, for public decencies? "Edification" may or may not be a concept of much currency outside of the New Testament these days. Yet it seems to me that we who claim at least some continuity of heart and mind with the communities of the New Testament might want to consider the notion as a motivation for and measure of what we publicly express and do, with an unabashed desire to foster the quality of common life, of public decency.

Early on the First Sunday after Pentecost: Trinity Sunday

Early on this refreshed and refreshing June morning, clear and cool, the sun pours glory from the eastern horizon upon roads and buildings and fields and rocks and all manner of life. Even the long westward shadows of houses and trees seem to heighten, not lessen, the effulgence of light which we see most sharply and intensely in the things of this world, a profuse multiplicity which yet coheres in this streaming luminance. Thus met and loved in beauties, one original, one derived, are the divine and the created.